Exploring sexual orientation

I’m amazed by the increasing acceptance of a wider variety of sexual orientations that has happened in my lifetime. I’ve seen that change happening within me too. I had no awareness of homosexuality until my About Your Sexuality class in my Unitarian Fellowship in which I grew up. I remember seeing slides of same sex couples with my jaw on the floor, which may give you a hint of my heterosexual orientation. I’d been attracted to girls for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t imagine a same sex attraction when I was twelve years old. Now I can.

That appreciation grew for me after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977, at the height of the sexual revolution going on there. In Berkeley, in the early 1980′s, I encountered multiple liberation movements to unshackle our attitudes about sexual expression and enjoyment. To show my solidarity and open mindedness, and maybe more out of curiosity, I even visited a gay bath-house with a gay friend of mine.

At that time, I couldn’t have envisioned the gay marriage movement. The lesbians and gays I knew were rejecting the hetero-dominant paradigm which included the institution of marriage. Monogamy was not the theme on display at that bath-house that encouraged anonymous sexual pleasure.

Yet the marriage equality movement created a frame for the dominant culture to begin to accept same sex relationships. Why not accept couples getting married who had long standing monogamist relationships that behaved like heterosexual married couples, for the most part. Why, some even had heterosexual children that they were raising and doing a fine job of it. The lynch pin of the argument that heterosexuals could appreciate is the fixed nature of their sexual-orientation. The utter failure of reparative therapy to change sexual-orientation further confirmed this. Society could accept this argument: If God or nature made them that way, why shouldn’t they be treated fairly?

As society’s acceptance has steadily increased for lesbian and gay relationships, other sexual-orientations are coming out of the closet. Homosexual and heterosexual are not the only choices. Maybe some of you saw the article in the Metroland about asexuality as a sexual orientation. Bisexuality now includes the term, “pansexual” extending bisexuality to people who are attracted to those who identify as transgender. There are a whole group of people who resist social gender roles, dress and behavior all together.

Youth are always on the frontier of social change. They have come up with a general name for people who consider themselves out of the boundaries of the stereotypical heterosexual norm. They call themselves, “queer.”

I found a new book in the young adult section of the East Greenbush library that helps a youth explore whether they are queer or not. Rather than using fixed definitions for sexual categories into which one might or might not fit, the focus of the book emphasizes self-discovery of gender identity and sexual orientation. The book affirms an individually oriented process of self-discovery rather than conforming to outer preexisting identities that one may or may not fit. It promotes acceptance of gender fluidity and variety in sexual attraction. No matter what you find inside, you are okay and worthy of receiving and giving love in a mutually affirming relationship.

More and more that kind of attitude is found in the media with prominent transgender people coming out and same sex relationships being featured regularly in theater, movies and situation comedies. Advertisers tailor their pitches to this market. Politicians recognize this demographic category to appeal to for votes. The medical profession no longer treats queers as mentally ill or maladjusted. Being queer is gradually getting normalized.

Still, there is plenty of queer-phobia. As affirming as the book for young adults is about being queer, it must coach the reader about how to face the process of coming out and living in a queer hostile culture.

And, religion is a big source of that hostility.

Since the beginning of the gay rights movement in the 1960′s, Unitarian Universalism has been in the forefront encouraging acceptance. We passed our first anti-discrimination resolution focused on society in 1970 and passed another one to rid our congregations of homophobia in 1980. While there is still work to be done especially on accepting transgender folks, our congregations are far more welcoming and affirming than most other religious denominations. While there is amazing movement in the dominant culture, mainstream religious voices remain resistant or, more often, deeply divided.

If we wish to have influence outside our own walls to encourage the process of acceptance, as well as examine internalized homophobia that may lurk within us, we need to understand the origins of homophobia in Western culture.

Homophobia did not exist in ancient Rome or Athens. They didn’t even have a word for it.

Male, free-born Roman citizens could have sex with their slaves and prostitutes, male or female, without any stigma at all. This freedom was independent of their marital status but did come with restrictions.

What mattered a great deal wasn’t who you had sex with, but how you did it. At issue was who was penetrating and who was being penetrated. To enforce social and sexual dominance, male Roman citizens were required to be the one planting the seed rather than becoming a receptacle for it. Sexual relations needed to reinforce one’s authority by retaining control of the sexual act, making it serve his pleasure and his desire. Such sexual relations were primarily about power and dominance rather than devotion and love. Those emotions were appropriate for the submitting partner only.

This male sexual license didn’t extend to exploiting free-born children or to another citizen’s wife. Nor was sexual libertine behavior encouraged. Moderation and self-control should rule the passions of the male citizen that put the good of the state, and the good of the family first.

This patriarchal social organization was the dominant model of the ancient world designed to satisfy and support male sexuality and assert male power. In war, conquest gave the victor the opportunity to rape and enslave the enemy as a way of humiliating and dominating them.

So, who suffered under Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman domination? The Jews.

Judaism might rightly claim inventing homophobia with the prohibition of sodomy mentioned in Leviticus. Given they were also a patriarchal culture and given they were conquered by the Persians about the time Leviticus was codified, being dominated by foreign powers over so years may have influenced their views on sexuality. Differentiation is a recurrent theme throughout the Hebrew scriptures. A significant feature of the Jewish people has been their resistance to assimilation and their maintenance of the uniqueness of Jewish identity, particularly in diaspora.

Another important difference between the tribes of Israel and the empires that enslaved them arose from their goat and sheep herding heritage. Hierarchical empires attained their wealth and power though domesticated agriculture that generated enough surplus wealth to support the development of large urban centers and armies. Herding cultures, on the other hand, are inherently more decentralized and egalitarian. First Samuel chronicles the clash of cultures as the Jewish people clamor against their Judge Samuel to have a king so they can become more powerful against their enemies and accumulate the wealth of their neighbors. Samuel warns against all the horrors of having a king that will take their wealth and enslave them.

By the time Jesus comes on the scene many, many years later, the Jews are groaning under Roman oppression. As an advocate of the oppressed and prophet against Jewish collusion with Roman rule, we have almost nothing from Jesus about relationships, sexual or otherwise. What we do have however is a vision of radical love that rocks the ancient world.

Queer Theologian, Patrick S. Cheng, presents a theology of Jesus you’ve probably never heard before. He contends that the love Jesus embodies, a love identical to God’s love, is so radical that it dissolves boundaries between people. Whether they are boundaries of gender identity, boundaries of sexual orientation, boundaries that separate us from God, Jesus’ radical love transcends and dissolves them.

He writes:

Radical love … at the heart of Christian theology … has dissolved the boundaries between death and life, time and eternity, and the human and the divine.

Similarly, radical love is also at the heart of queer theory because it challenges our existing boundaries with respect to sexuality and gender identity (for example, “gay” vs. “straight,” or “male” vs. “female”) as social constructions and not essentialist, or fixed, concepts.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus constantly dissolved the religious and social boundaries of his time. He ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners. He touched “unclean” people such as lepers and bleeding women. He spoke with special outcasts such as Samaritans. In other words, Jesus Christ dissolved the “holy” boundaries of clean and unclean, holy and profane, and saint and sinner.

Cheng goes on to suggest that Jesus may have been bisexual because of his deep identification with the oppressed. Cheng’s theology is way more Trinitarian than many of us would find appealing. Still, his vision of Jesus is far more counter-cultural than the tame, blond, soft blue eyed picture of Jesus familiar to Catholics and evangelical Christians.

What I appreciate so much about Cheng’s vision of Jesus is that radical understanding of love Jesus embodies. Whether you believe in his divinity or not, The Jesus of scripture exemplifies, in a form that is humanly attainable, a kind of radical love to guide us as we express our gender identity and sexual orientation.

Before Jesus, social power defined how people related to each other. Relationships served the God of social order and control, served the purposes of the state, the tradition and the family. Boundary crossing, radically loving Jesus put the inner experience of the individual first. Jesus honors the inner life, the inner knowing of the person as the guide rather than conforming to law, convention and norms that are life denying rather than life affirming.

Unitarian Universalism, born of Christian roots, finds this same message in other world religious traditions too. We find this valuing of inner knowing in secular philosophy as well. We celebrate the recognition and appreciation of our individual inner light as a growth and development within the thought of Unitarians and Universalists over the years too and with Unitarian Universalists today.

Following our conscience, our own inner light is consistent with being queer and consistent with our approach to religion. Our approach to faith isn’t about dominance and control. It is all about living into the transforming power of love. In a way, choosing to be queer is a spiritual gift because it affirms the process of looking inside and having the courage to bring it outside and live your truth. Those of us who are heterosexual and fit in with the culture get a pass on this. We don’t need to stand up and stand out. This generates queer envy in me.

And those of us who are heterosexual can still be courageous too. We can stand up and stand out aspiring to be allies to the queer community. May that be our challenge and our opportunity to celebrate love in all of its rainbow colors that stretch across the sky that connects us all together.